Challenging Conventional Recreations of the Western Past: Frank Bergon's Shoshone Mike

The rise to prominence of western since late 1960s promoted increasing demand for truth, fact, and credibility in postfrontier western writing. Despite extraordinary popularity of traditional views of myth of West, important group of contemporary imaginative authors started to write about this territory with greater insight into reality behind myth. They intended to depart from historical inaccuracy of old western literature, from its narrative improbabilities and its predictable stockpile of characters. Nevertheless, interaction between myth and reality in West is so strong in American imagination that both elements will often remain intertwined in new western fiction. As Frank Bergon and Zeese Papanikolas have noted, West has become so overlaid with legend, it is popularly assumed that a stripping of its mythic veneer would reveal 'real' West. Nothing could be less true.... The West surely created myths, but myths themselves just as surely created West ... and it is for this reason that real West can be seen as what Archibald MacLeish called 'a country in mind.' (2) The resilience of myth of West among new western writers and recognition of existence of complex interdependencies between mythic West and historic West cannot hide fact that postfrontier fiction tends to break with traditional visions of western mythology. In following I argue that Frank Bergon's critically acclaimed novel Shoshone Mike (3) exemplifies one of main features of new western fiction: revision or deconstruction of myth of West in order to expose its artificial and ethnocentric dimensions, with a concomitant emphasis on realism and multicultural diversity. I examine Frank Bergon's novel as a major testimony to increasing demand for truth, fact, and verisimilitude in recent western fiction, focusing on Bergon's insightful approach to interplay between myth and history in West and on his challenging of stereotypical recreations of western past. New western authors treat old myths in fresh new ways, often debunking conventional constructs of western past and exposing limitations of heroic western narratives. These writers are aware of fact that Old West has been mythicized almost beyond recognition, and because of that myth no longer becomes a serious handicap for their writing. In this sense they differ from old western writers, committed to transmitting cowboy myths of taming American West. As William Kittredge aptly recalls, the myth has been insidious trap for those who would write about American West, a box for imagination. For a long time it was as if there was only one legitimate story to tell about West, and that was mythological story. (4) New western fiction does not exploit myth of frontier, but revises or reinterprets traditional Anglo-male visions of Old West, focusing on tension between historical West and mythic West. Certainly, due to pluralistic condition of this fiction, any attempt to define its main features may become a risky overgeneralization. However, following list provided by Michael Johnson to explain essential differences between old western literature and new western literature may be regarded as accurate summary of basic characteristics of contemporary western fiction: an emphatic attention to history as what did happen rather than as what should have happened; to staying of Western people rather than their going, to their efforts at community rather than their individualistic spirit, to possibility of stewarding land rather than destructively exploiting it. (5) The above defining concerns of new western fiction are present in a significant number of contemporary western novels and short stories centered on Old West and its legacy. We may even find in postfrontier western writing one of most impressive fictional approaches to overlapping of real and mythic in West: Frank Bergon's Shoshone Mike. …

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